Though world leaders recently cheered a historic agreement to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, a deal endorsed by 195 countries at the Paris Climate Summit last December, those who believe the climate crisis was put to bed should think again.

It's true this was the first time that countries, both rich and poor, committed to reducing their emissions in such a way as to maintain global temperature rise to maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) with a pledge to try to keep it even lower. However, current global commitments will still bring us to around 3 degrees Celsius of warming through the year 2100 — well above the levels deemed dangerous for civilization.

And that's if countries keep their promises. As it stands, the agreement in Paris carries so little weight to enforce its targets that scientist and advocate James Hansen, among the first to ring the alarm on climate change, has labeled it "a fraud."

This agreement won't save the planet. It may have saved the chance to save the planet (if we all fight like hell in the years ahead) @cop21

This is where activists see a role for themselves in 2016. The world's central pressure groups working on climate change, including Greenpeace, Avaaz.org and 350.org, are committed to bridging the gap between the Paris accord and the insufficient reduction commitments across the planet.

"We need to take that agreement and use it as a tool to accelerate action across the board," Jamie Henn, 350.org's strategy and communications director, tells Mashable.

In the coming months, climate activists will be tackling the issue with two principal approaches. One is to shut down high-emissions fossil fuel projects, otherwise known as the "Keep It in the Ground" approach. The other involves creating the right political and economic conditions across the world for an accelerated switch to clean and renewable forms of energy. Most groups maintain that both approaches will be necessary to meet the ambitious global emissions targets implied by a maximum 2 degree Celsius global warming limit.

Others, like billionaire climate advocate Tom Steyer and his NextGen Climate group, are now focusing their energies on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Steyer feels "the timeframe set for us by the natural world" lends urgency to this race, and calls for "a president who will step in to put energy and climate at the top of the agenda."

"Carbon bombs"

With a sense that time is running out, many climate activists feel protests involving nonviolent resistance are necessary to quickly shut down certain dirty energy projects, rather than wait for governments to legislate them out of existence.

To this end, a large coalition of organizations, including Greenpeace, Avaaz.org and 350.org, are getting behind the BreakFree campaign, a series of grassroots-led actions planned for May of this year. Thousands will mobilize to swarm the "pressure points where we as organized citizens can make an impact," Henn, of 350.org, says.

The pressure points to be targeted by direct actions this year have been defined since 2013, when Greenpeace International published Point of No Return, a report that mapped out planned expansions of the world's dirtiest energy projects.

Included in this list were Canada's tar sands, new coal mines in Australia and China, and offshore oil drilling in Brazil, among others. In the words of Stephanie Brancaforte, Greenpeace's climate and energy campaign leader, these are "the big carbon bombs that really can't be allowed to go off," if the world wants to keep climate change to an acceptable level.

However radical and dangerous it may seem, the protesters' civil disobedience strategy is vetted by policy experts such as David Karpf, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and former Sierra Club campaigner. Referring to activists' success at blocking the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S., he notes this kind of direct nonviolent resistance is "a crucial approach that always ends up more effective than we think."

The recent virtual shutdown of Canada's Northern Gateway pipeline, also largely credited to activist pressure, certainly upholds Karpf's assessment. Similarly, President Obama's early 2016 moratorium on future coal leases on federal lands is yet another sign that the struggle to phase out new high carbon energy projects has gained forward momentum.

Divestment and solar

Another way to put a wrench in the works is to cut funding for dirty energy. The global Divestment Movement has already been doing considerable work in this regard by persuading several banks, universities and other charitable endowments, representing a collective $3.4 trillion worth of capital, to remove fossil fuel investments from their books.

In 2016, divestment campaigners will be ramping up their activities and taking their show to Wall Street, where they will go after even bigger financial institutions.

"Expect more large fights in New York," Henn says, disclosing to Mashable that the movement will now target the world's largest money managers, such as Blackrock and State Street.

Though the cumulative amounts so far denied to the fossil fuel industry through divestment are small considering the vast wealth of the industry as a whole, financial leaders such as Bank of England Governor Mark Carney are already warning that the investment structures behind future coal, oil and gas projects are on shaky ground.

For those promoting a rapid transition to clean and renewable energy as a way out of the climate crisis, their proposed alternatives have never been more attractive. Professor Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere and Energy Program at Stanford University and long-time clean energy champion, believes that such solutions in 2016 are affordable and technically feasible in the 139 countries and 50 U.S. states that he has assessed for their energy needs.

"Many countries will now see that it's to their disadvantage not to change over to renewables," Jacobson says.

Still, activists like Greenpeace's Brancaforte believe that politicians in many countries will need a stronger nudge to implement policy frameworks that would favor the emergence of more clean energy projects.

To this end, Greenpeace is supporting grassroots initiatives to build solar projects in Canada and the U.S., but also in developing countries such as Turkey and India. In Brazil, a particularly successful citizen-led solar movement fought the government on unfair tax regimes that penalized local solar projects, and secured financial incentives for new developments.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election

The U.S. presidential election this year is shaping up to be a major battlefront on climate. For David Karpf, it is essential for the country to now make up for all the "lost years" of action on climate, notably during the Bush administration.

"We have a ticking clock," he says. "We cannot afford to lose another four to eight years."

To move things forward, California-based businessman and advocate Tom Steyer has put his considerable resources behind NextGen Climate, a political action group that uses a two-pronged approach to bring the issue to the table. On one hand, they run programs to drive young voter awareness around climate change in key primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. Their goal here is to drive voters under 35 to raise the issue at political events and of course, to go out and vote for the right candidates.

Focusing on the candidates themselves, NextGen Climate has asked both Republican and Democratic contenders to come up with a plan that would have clean energy providing 50% of U.S. needs by 2030.

So far, leading Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have stepped up with proposed plans to make a rapid transition to wind and solar energy, and to cut U.S. emissions by 30-40% by 2030.

Though NextGen Climate will be keeping up the pressure until the very end of the election, Steyer is confident that the next president will have no choice but to make climate change a priority.

"It is going to be impossible to be elected president in 2016 without accepting the science and putting forward concrete policies and solutions toward a clean economy," he says.

Looking ahead

Those who dedicate most of their waking hours to the climate crisis view the challenges to come with varying degrees of optimism. Clean energy experts like Stanford's Jacobson believe that countries will come to see the benefits of switching off fossil fuels and surpass the emissions commitments they made at the Paris summit.

"Information is the number one impediment" that keeps leaders from making the change, he says.

Activists see things differently. From Greenpeace's point of view: "It's about the industries of the past making way for the cleaner industries of the future, and they're not going to go without a fight," Brancaforte says.

Henn of 350.org agrees, summing up the current situation by explaining that we still have a long way to go.

"Hey, there's hope, there's momentum, we're beginning to put serious points on the board — but let's not fool ourselves," he says. "We're up against the most powerful industry in the world, and we got started really late in this fight."

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